Traditional communication involving a person is characterized in an unspecific operating application. For example, a user chooses to browse a webpage, to play a video, etc., through an input device, e.g., a keyboard, a mouse, a tablet, etc., of a terminal equipment and thus initiates a variety of applications. Correspondingly, Machine to Machine Communication (M2M) is data communication, conducted between entities, in which interaction with a person may not necessarily be required. M2M communication differs from an existing human-machine interaction model in that:                There is a new or different market prospect of applications;        There is a lower cost;        There are a large number of potential machine communication terminal equipments; and        The majority of traffic volumes of each machine terminal equipment are low.        
Therefore M2M communication is promising to be a characteristic or an application in the IMT-Advanced. A market survey shows the market of M2M communication will grow rapidly and become applied widely in the industry and the in the consumption market.
An M2M terminal equipment includes a sensor, for example. Typically an application operating on the M2M sensor is unique and specific, for example, an M2M terminal equipment is only responsible for reporting temperature data to a server to monitor a change in temperature, and another M2M terminal equipment is only responsible for reporting data of a gas meter, etc., to the server. Therefore an M2M terminal equipment is at a low cost and expected to be suitable to a large-scale application.
An existing terminal equipment has to perform considerable interaction of signaling with a network prior to establishment of a communication and transmission of service data therebetween. A signaling overhead can be negligible as compared with service data because there is a large amount of service data for an application, e.g., voice communication, video transmission, etc., requested by the existing terminal equipment. However the amount of uplink service data transmitted by general M2M terminal equipment is typically low in M2M communication, and such signaling interaction in an existing communication system may not be suitable for M2M communication due to a considerable overhead and an increase in the complexity of transmitting service data.
FIG. 1 illustrates a schematic structural diagram of a network of an existing communication system, where an M2M terminal equipment 1 operates like a traditional mobile terminal equipment. The terminal equipment 1 interacts with a base station 2 (as represented by a solid line A in FIG. 1) and interacts with an M2M server 3 in an upper layer protocol, e.g., a Non-Access Stratum (NAS) protocol in the 3GPP, etc., (as represented by a dotted line B in FIG. 1). Therefore a plurality of handshakes at different peer layers are required, but the amount of actually transmitted data, i.e., the amount of service data, is very low. Thus there is considerable redundancy resulting from uplink transmission of the terminal equipment. In other words, the existing network architecture is very uneconomic for M2M communication.
FIG. 2 illustrates a protocol stack of the existing system. Signaling interaction between the terminal equipment 1 and the base station 2 as well as between the terminal equipment 1 and the server 3 at respective protocol layers in the prior art will be described in details as exemplified in FIG. 2. As illustrated in FIG. 2, a Radio Access Network (RAN) including the base station interacts with the terminal equipment 1 in handshakes at respective underlying layers including the physical layer (PHY) and the Media Access Control (MAC) layer and then in a handshake at the Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP) layer. The terminal equipment 1 will further establish a Transport Control Protocol (TCP) connection and even an application layer connection with the server 3 (as represented by a dotted line in FIG. 2) also in a plurality of required rounds of handshakes including transmission of a reception acknowledgement message. Therefore the terminal equipment 1 has to keep awake for a long period of time which consumes power on one hand and is required to receive and transmit more redundant signaling messages in this network architecture on the other hand.